


Heart's Been Traveling Through This Night

by APgeeksout



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Hair Washing, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Non-Penetrative Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:33:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can we - ” he bounced on the balls of his feet and made a spastic gesture in the general direction of the parking ramp.  “Can we be done here?”</p>
<p>Roman and Dean, after taping for the Smackdown airing on 8.8.2014.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart's Been Traveling Through This Night

**Author's Note:**

> No one ever goes on plot-inconvenient international tours in kayfabe, right? Roman was totally there for this episode. Yep. 
> 
> Title snagged from Joel Plaskett's "One Look."

Fifteen long minutes had ticked past since the cameras had stopped rolling, abruptly ending the feed to the monitor in the dressing room. Roman had just resolved himself to go prowl through the bowels of the arena and find Dean - save him from the Authority, or, more likely, himself - when the locker room door swung open to admit the man himself, shoulders bowed, eyes downcast, and hair plastered down with sweat and some fan's seven-dollar Coke.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Was just coming to look for you.” 

Dean slunk the rest of the way into the room, scrubbing the fingers of one wrapped hand down his cheeks and over his chin. “Here I am. Like a bad penny, always turning up.” 

Roman smiled, but didn't otherwise reply or make a move; he'd long since learned that when Dean was in this jagged mood it was best to let him decide how to play the moment. 

“Can we - ” he bounced on the balls of his feet and made a spastic gesture in the general direction of the parking ramp. “Can we be done here?”

“I am if you are.” 

Dean nodded - the kind of nod that involved his whole body and told Roman that he was still running mostly on adrenaline – and took another couple of steps into the room. He snatched a hoodie from the back of a chair and shrugged into it, shifting his left shoulder more gingerly in private than he had in the ring. 

“Doing okay?” Roman asked, knowing even as he formed the words that the answer would be some form of 'fine' and almost completely bullshit. 

“Golden.” Dean gave a smile that was mostly bared teeth, swept an assortment of tape and water bottles, protein bars and spare laundry, off of a countertop and into his gym bag. “Let's get the fuck out of Dodge.” 

The arena had descended into the usual controlled chaos of post-taping teardown; crew and venue staff moving purposefully through cement and steel hallways. No one paid them much attention as they wound their way through the structure toward the rental. The venomous expression that Dean slanted out from beneath his hood probably warned off anyone with any sense of self-preservation who might have thought about approaching them. 

Dean flung his bag carelessly into the backseat, and dropped into shotgun with just as little apparent regard for his body. Roman winced on his behalf – the hits Dean had taken in the ring (and off the steps; Orton and Seth would each be paying for every single one of those, Roman had already decided) hadn't been all salesmanship – but didn't say anything, just hit the gas and guided the little rental Ford out of the venue and onto the surface streets of Laredo. 

“Food?”

Dean screwed up his face, contemplating. “Get something delivered later, maybe? Pizza or whatever's open?” He shifted in the seat, hunching up further inside his sweatshirt. “I'm kind of done with this day. Like, for good. Fuck Tuesday.” 

“It's settled. From here on in, we go straight from Monday to Wednesday,” he agreed. 

Traffic thinned out the further they got from the arena, and they fell quiet as they closed the few miles back to the hotel. It wasn't an entirely comfortable silence, with Dean tucking up tighter and tighter in the seat, and Roman unable to resist casting what he knew to be completely unsubtle worried glances his way. 

“Figure out anything interesting about Orton?” Roman was pretty sure Dean was asking just for the sake of breaking the silence. 'Doing recon on my Summerslam opponent' had been his prepared explanation if anyone questioned his lurking around the arena when wasn't scheduled for the show, but they both knew he'd been there because Dean was. Just because he'd agreed to let Dean settle up with Seth first didn't mean he was going to leave him to do it alone. 

“He's good,” Roman allowed. “We're better.”

“Yeah, you'll probably want to do a little better than me at avoiding the RKO,” Dean said ruefully. 

“Nah,” Roman said, turning into the hotel lot. “You had him before Seth-” Interfered. Cheated. Betrayed – again. He was still reaching for an end to that sentence while he tucked the rental into a space and turned off the key. 

Dean gave a soft noise of dissatisfaction as he unfolded from the seat. While he stretched and grumbled, Roman leaned into the backseat, fished Dean's gear bag out of the floorboard, and slung it over his own shoulder. 

“And they say chivalry is dead,” Dean smirked, falling into step beside him.

He reached out and dropped his hand on the back of Dean's neck, giving him a squeeze through the fabric of his hood and using the grip to steer him toward the warm light of the hotel entrance. 

They made it across the lobby without more than a couple of curious _should I know you?_ glances from members of the night staff and patrons of the hotel bar. In the elevator, Dean shimmied along to a beat that didn't correspond to the muzak being piped in – the kind of essentially _Dean_ dance that usually meant he needed to do something without knowing exactly what. The sight touched off one of those sharp surges of affection – almost an actual, physical tug in his chest – that, even from early days, had swept over Roman without warning around his brothers. (“ _Business partners_ ,” echoed in his head, a nasty little voice that had never belonged to his Seth.) 

Acting on impulse – no matter how Seth had burned him, he refused to doubt the urge to demonstrate to people how he felt about them; if he let the Authority take that from him then he might as well sell his soul, too – he hauled Dean against his chest in a one-armed hug. For his part, Dean patted the arm that curled around him and sagged into the embrace for the rest of the ride to their floor. 

Roman let them in to their room and dropped Dean's bag on the foot of the nearest bed. He watched Dean prowl the narrow strip of carpet between the far bed and the window before he spoke up. 

“How're you feeling?”

Dean pushed back the hood of his sweatshirt and grimaced. “Sticky.” He started picking absently at the tape on his left hand. “Crusty.”

Roman crossed over to him and reached out to snag Dean's hand and peel off the tape, unraveling the careful wrapping around his knuckles and wrist. 

“Gross, basically,” Dean continued, “Think I'm gonna need to shower from now until Summerslam.”

“Yeah?” he smiled, discarding one crumpled strip of tape and trading Dean's fidgeting left hand for his still-wrapped right. “Want some company?” 

Dean stilled at that. “You don't have to do that,” he mumbled, looking studiously at his shoes, their hands, the window's glamorous view of the parking lot, anywhere but Roman's face. 

“Not what I asked,” he said, unspooling the last of the tape from Dean's wrist and circling the joint with his fingers instead. “If you need some space, just say the word and I'll clear out for a little while. But, if it's anything else, then I have to say this: I agreed to let you take care of Seth on your own, and I mean to keep my word. In the meantime, though, I need you to let me take care of you.” 

He was playing dirty, he knew; Dean wouldn't refuse him something he said he needed any more than Roman had been able to when the tables had been turned. Still, if he was going to spend night after night watching other people – more often than not, watching Seth – hurt Dean without interceding on camera, he was damn sure going to undo as much of it as he could once they were alone. 

Dean swallowed hard and looked up at him, finally, through his eyelashes. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He curled his free hand against the side of Dean's neck and stroked a thumb along the line of his cheekbone. Dean's eyes slid shut, and he leaned into the contact. 

Roman tugged him close again, pressed a kiss to his temple, and released him with a gentle nudge toward the bathroom. “Go ahead,” he said, “I'm going to get some ice, so that it's here when you're ready for it.” 

He didn't say that they should have hit the trainers up for an ice pack before they left the arena, or that he knew Dean would want a minute alone to steady himself. They'd been teammates (Friends. Family.) for long enough that Dean heard it all anyway, and threw him a fond smirk and a nod of thanks before he retreated. 

By the time he'd stashed a couple of bucketloads of ice in the cooler that lived with their road gear, the shower was running, the hush of water-on-tile and a cloud of warm steam escaping into the room from beyond the cracked door. 

He knocked lightly, a wordless _hey, just me_ and stepped through. Dean's ring gear was discarded in a haphazard pile behind the door. Instead of the shadow behind the translucent door of the shower that he'd expected, he found Dean standing in front of the fogged mirror, head bowed, shoulders squared, arms braced against the counter.

“Dean? You good?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice came out tighter than Roman thought he probably intended. “Yeah. Just moving slow tonight.”

Roman moved his eyes over the taut, strained lines of Dean's body, and realized (again; somehow this still and always took him by surprise) how hard this was for Dean. Given the choice, he was sure that Dean would take twenty minutes of stiff punches over twenty minutes of tenderness. Beneath the ache that knowledge kindled in his chest, he felt a bloom of rage, too. He wanted to return the pain to everyone who had put that line of wary tension in his brother's spine, starting with Seth and working his way backward to the very first person who had ever taught Dean that he was hard to love, easy to leave.

He shook out his hands, unclenching the fists that had formed without his conscious attention and tamped down his anger for another time, another body; he would not touch Dean with violence on his mind, even (especially) knowing that Dean expected as much from the world. He stepped further into the room, stopping behind Dean and cataloging not just his posture, but the marks on his body, old and new: the ragged ridges of barbed-wire scarring etched onto his right shoulder; yellow and green and brown bruises the fading evidence of matches and ambushes past; angry red marks layered over the cooler colors on the abused skin of his bum shoulder; the bite of the edge of the ring stairs describing lines of purple against his ribs. 

He traced a hand down Dean's side, careful to avoid all the obvious hurts in his path, and leaned in to drop a light kiss against the back of his neck. “Hot water'll help,” he said, gratified when Dean loosened fractionally under his touch. 

Dean made a quiet noise of agreement and reached back to gather a handful of Roman's t-shirt in his fist. “Kinda think it's bullshit that you're still wearing so many clothes.”

He chuckled against Dean's skin, and relished the answering tremor that passed over the warm skin beneath his hand. “Yeah? Would you call it an injustice?” 

It was Dean's turn to huff out a soft laugh. He turned, and tucked his fingers inside the waist of his jeans, knuckles skimming over Roman's hip as he crossed the last few steps to the shower. “Call it whatever you want, just fix it.” 

Since that night in June, Roman had done everything in his power to make things okay for Dean, to prove that they were enough for each other, to rebuild partnership and trust and home out of the wreckage Seth had pulled down on their heads. Which meant that when Dean wanted him to “fix” his terrible fully-dressed state, he made quick work of his clothes and stepped into the shower stall behind him. 

Dean stood beneath the spray, eyes closed, face tipped upward, the water slicking his hair back and sluicing down his neck and over the lines and angles of his body. If they were different people – hell, if they were still the people they'd been before Indianapolis – then Roman might have said aloud that he was beautiful. 

But the person Dean was would have either closed down and throw him out of the shower or put on an elaborate display of _well, of_ course _I am_ without actually believing a word of it. And the person Roman had become wouldn't jeopardize the fragile opportunity to help Dean rid himself of the night he'd just had, so he kept his silence and appreciated the view and waited for his chance to show Dean how awed he was to be trusted with it. To be, maybe, the last and only person who was now. 

Dean shifted, so that the strongest part of the spray beat down on his left shoulder. It brought him half a step closer to Roman in the tight space, and Dean flashed one of his rare, unguarded _we're kinda fuckin' great, huh?_ smiles as he reached past him toward the shelf set into the wall of the shower. 

Roman took Dean's hand and lifted the bottle of shampoo from his grasp. Dean looked at him from under narrowed eyebrows, deciding, Roman knew, whether and how he should protest. 

“I got this,” he said. “You know I know from hair products.” That drew the desired smirk from Dean. “Turn around.” 

And maybe Dean did shake his head like Roman was too ridiculous even to laugh at, but he did turn, and after repositioning himself under the faucet, submitted to Roman's care without further push-back. 

He poured shampoo into the hollow of his palm and worked a good lather into Dean's hair, scraping gentle fingernails over his scalp, his hands moving in the kind of steady, slow rhythm that had nearly put him out in more than one salon chair over the years. 

He thought he was doing pretty well – what with Dean tilting his head to meet his touch and his posture steadily growing more lax – though it became increasingly clear that Roman had overestimated how much shampoo he'd actually need. 

Dean pushed a tide of suds back from his forehead and said, “'I know from hair product', huh?” 

“In my defense,” he answered, squeezing some of the extra lather out of Dean's hair and rubbing it in easy circles over his back, “it's been a lot of years since I had this little hair to work with.”

“Well, we can't all be Rapunzel,” Dean said, and started using the excess bubbles to scrub away sweat and grime and, Roman hoped, aches and exhaustion and every other heavy thing he'd carried out of the ring with him. 

Dean tilted his head back under the water, rinsing out the shampoo, and rolled his shoulder experimentally.

“Any better?”

Dean stepped back from the spray once more with an eloquent half-shrug. “Don't think it's gonna fall off, anyway.”

“Small favors,” Roman said, spreading a dollop of conditioner over his hands, and working them both into Dean's hair in a slow, firm massage, starting at his temples and working back to the crown of his head, then down toward the back of his neck. 

“Condition me all you want,” Dean grumbled, the lazy way he leaned into the pressure of Roman's fingers belying the crankiness of his tone. “Hair's still gonna be the only manageable thing about me.”

“Yeah?” Roman worked his thumbs into the base of Dean's neck, and smiled at the contented little noise that the touch wrung out of him. “Guess it's a good thing I like you when you're contrary.” 

Dean tensed again, going altogether still in that way that he so rarely was, steeling for a blow that was never going to come. Not from Roman. (Or, he vowed, from anyone else he could put down before they came within striking distance.)

He took one hand away from Dean's neck and slung it around his chest in another careful, backwards hug. 

“Of course, I'm probably biased,” Roman paused, dipped his head and placed a kiss beneath Dean's ear, in the soft spot next to the hinge of his jaw, “considering I like you pretty much all the time, so...”

Dean sucked in a breath and reached up to grasp Roman's forearm, fingers scrabbling against wet skin. He mumbled something, but the words were lost to Roman under the shush of the water. 

“Hmm?” he hummed out, with his lips still pressed against the softness of the side of Dean's neck, because he really was a bad man sometimes. 

“Touch me,” Dean repeated, voice louder than before, and gone husky. “Please. Fuck.” 

He'd been touching Dean pretty much constantly since they'd gotten out of the car – and grown-ass adults sharing a shower meant something different in a hotel room than in a locker room – but he'd been waiting for a sign from Dean, an indication of what he needed or wanted from the night. 

“I can do that,” he murmured into Dean's skin, carding fingers back through his hair and dropping his other arm to wrap around him too, one hand settling over Dean's heart, the other curling against his hip, thumb slotting into the sculpted hollow alongside the jut of his hipbone. 

His hands were still slick with the remnants of the conditioner, and he let the one positioned at Dean's hip skate over the planes of the lowest part of his belly and along the patch of damp curls below, before reaching lower still to wrap his hand experimentally around Dean's cock, already half-hard. 

“This all for me?” He dropped his voice into a stupidly low register usually reserved for boiler-room promos, and let his lips brush the shell of Dean's ear. He might have felt silly about it, except that it made Dean first arch against him and then give a soft, deep laugh that he felt roll through his chest as much as heard. 

“You see anybody else here?”

And that was a dangerous question, because they were both still seeing Seth everywhere, stumbling over the spaces he used to fill, but Dean didn't seem to be thinking on that right now, and Roman wasn't going to be the one to remind him if he could help it. 

He dropped his mouth to the place where Dean's neck joined with his shoulder and swept the hand on his chest down to find a nipple and tease it to firmness, while his other hand settled into a slow, even stroke along Dean's length. 

He knew that Dean liked to be handled roughly sometimes: a scrape of teeth or fingernails, a grip tight enough to leave marks or restrict breath. But over these last couple of months – over the long minutes of Dean's match tonight – it felt like all he'd done was watch and seethe while Seth and his new _business partners_ laid into Dean, giving him fresh wounds, grinding salt into all the old ones, meticulously reopened in the way only someone who'd once been allowed in close enough to soothe them would've known how to do. 

He'd given his word that he wouldn't intervene, and just as he would not let himself become one more person who broke promises to Dean, he refused to be yet another to lay hands on him with the intent to hurt. Another night might find him ready again to dole out the sweet edge of pain Dean sometimes craved, but all Roman could think of tonight was that everybody else in their world was already lining up to work Dean over. He was probably the last person left who was inclined – and almost certainly the last who would be permitted – to treat his brother gently. It wasn't a gift he planned to squander. 

So, when Dean reached down, tangling their fingers together, trying to set a harsher pace, Roman curled his hand around Dean's and pulled them both away from Dean's erection. He smiled in spite of himself at the breathy noise of frustration, barely audible over the running water, that Dean made at the loss of friction. 

He kissed Dean's cheek, a quick, fond peck that could almost have been chaste, if he hadn't just been handling Dean's hard-on, if he hadn't been so aware of his own cock, steadily growing heavier and thicker between them. 

“Let me take care of you,” he said, squeezing the fingers he held in his own. 

Dean gave a petulant little huff, but Roman could hear the humor in his words. “Never was any good at keeping my hands to myself.”

“Don't I know it.” He slid the hand that had been at Dean's chest down the defined ridges of his stomach, flattening his palm against the firm musculature at his waist and stroking splayed fingers over sensitive skin.

He released Dean's hand and let his own wander back down to resume its deliberate, almost teasing rhythm. 

Dean flexed his fingers a few times, hand hovering indecisively in the air, as though he were struggling with the urge to hurry him along again. Eventually, he curled his arm around his midsection and settled his grasp, warm and slippery, around Roman's forearm, thumb tucking into the crease of his elbow. 

“That's right,” Roman said, and rewarded him for his patience by changing up his stroke, incorporating a turn of the wrist that made Dean's hips jerk. “I've got you.”

He was still moving slowly – torturously, he guessed Dean would say if he asked in so many words – varying his touch in little ways and gathering which ones worked best from the way the muscles of Dean's abdomen contracted under his palm and the fingers biting spasmodically into his arm, the rock of his hips and, once, the way Dean breathed out his name, head tipping back to rest for a lazy moment against Roman's shoulder. 

His lips traced a line across Dean's shoulder and up his neck, stopping again at the tender spot beneath his ear. “Sorry I don't have any trash-talk in me tonight,” he started. Truth was, he'd listened to Seth pour more than enough filth into Dean's ear tonight. 

“Dunno,” Dean said, his hips stuttering in their rhythm, pushing more erratically into Roman's hand. “Feels like you're doing pretty good without it.” 

He chuckled against Dean's neck, earning him a brief clench of muscle and press of fingernails against his own skin. “Doesn't mean I don't have anything to say to you,” he continued, voice pitched low, mouth grazing Dean's ear with every syllable. “I'm glad you never learned to stay down. I hope you never do. S'what makes you you.” 

He could feel how close Dean was, in the new tremble in the grip on his arm and the way his belly coiled taut beneath his hand and the helpless buck of his hips, as Roman worked his hand this much tighter, that much faster around him. 

Roman talked him all the way through it. At some point, even Roman lost track of what he was talking about, but that was okay. What he'd needed to say – needed for Dean to hear – was the litany of _you matter, you matter, to me, you matter_ underneath the words. 

When Dean finally came, it was with a harsh gasp that might have been mistaken for a sob. But, he leaned back on unsteady legs, pressing them together from shoulder to thigh, and when he lolled his head back to look at Roman, it was with a satisfied grin that carved a dimple into his cheek. 

Gradually, he straightened in Roman's hold, taking his own weight back and tapping the arm that circled his middle. Roman started to release him but Dean simply turned in his embrace, and set about getting him off with the same manic intensity he'd brought to every other challenge they'd faced together. 

Not that this would be any great test of his skills; being able to make Dean come apart against him had left him hard and aching. One of Dean's hands went to his cock, the sudden heat and pressure pulling a low sound of want right up from his gut, while the other snaked up to fist in his hair. The yank he'd expected – a little burst of pain to sharpen his pleasure – never came. Dean tipped his head forward, eyes closed, and pressed their foreheads together, and it occurred to him that Dean wasn't planning to pull his hair, that he was using the grip as an anchor. It was that realization as much as the expert twist of Dean's fingers that tipped him over the edge, spilling over Dean's hand and both of their bellies with a moan that Dean swallowed in a sloppy kiss. 

It was his turn to sag into Dean, his bones momentarily gone molten. Dean didn't unwind the fingers wrapped in his hair, though his other hand, still hot and sticky, shifted to brace against his hip.

“You know,” he said, after Dean's mouth had drifted away from his own, following a leisurely, eccentric route down to his collarbone, “I think I'm dirtier now than when I got in.”

Dean laughed. “I have that effect on people.” He took a step back, pulling Roman with him to stand under the spray, using his hand and the falling water to rinse them both clean.

“You can make a mess of me any time.” 

Dean froze again, just for the space of a heartbeat or two, before he tipped his head to rest on Roman's shoulder. “I'm always a fucking mess, but same here.”


End file.
